Gaining a Face: The Romanticism of C.S. Lewis by James Prothero and Donald T. Williams (review)

Gaining a Face: The Romanticism of C.S. Lewis, by James Prothero and Donald T. Williams, questions the general view of Lewis as a Christian writer and argues that there is a larger Romantic component to his style that many readers overlook. The authors maintain a consistent non-confrontational tone that allows readers, regardless of investment in the subject, access to their subject matter. This approachability, however, also leaves openings for those that disagree with their premise. Even with this, the book is a compelling take on an author that is frequently overlooked, as Prothero and Williams point out, as “genre fiction.”

In order to support their main argument, the authors create a framework for a definition of Romanticism that allows for Lewis to be compared. They are aware of the challenge, and fully admit that it is an opinion with which many scholars will disagree. The first and most difficult issue is that Lewis was not active during the traditionally defined Romantic period. This takes up much of the underlying work, and the authors build a logical series of connections to the likes of Wordsworth and Coleridge through later authors like George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton. For readers that are not married to the temporal limitations of the term “romanticism”, the stylistic progression presented by Prothero and Williams is convincing.

The Romantic elements of Lewis’ work that much of the author’s argument is centered on are his approach towards writing children, a pastoral version of heaven, and his complicated relationship with the subject of the imagination. The topics are, in general, so frequently associated with Lewis as to be nearly stereotypical, but the author’s examinations allow for an alternate take that is based less in Christianity and a bit more in Romantic Aesthetics.

There are a few points that are potentially open for argument that could lead to further discussion. Early on, they assert that Lewis, in addressing material similar to Wordsworth through his later Christian approach, actually finishes off the work of his predecessors and thus places him among the Romantics. The Christian ontology that allows for Lewis’ objective completion of the Romantic task at the same time distances him from the subjective contemplation of the sublime that characterizes the genre.

The main critic that Prothero and Williams address is Lewis himself, as he personally decried the sensual potential expressed in Romanticism. This is a critique that lingers throughout the book until it is deftly deflected by Lewis’s own argument that authors cannot be self-defining. This gambit pays off, as the framework provided draws the argument of the book together and ultimately makes for an easily accepted conclusion.

Overall, Gaining a Face articulates a potentially contentious interpretation of the nature of C.S. Lewis’ body of work which is commendably defended by Prothero and Williams. Aside from the examination of Lewis’ work, the cumulative definition of what it means to be a Romantic author in general is potentially of interest to a wider variety of scholars.